Catriona Parry

Catriona is currently Departmental Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Portuguese, based at Wadham College. She is responsible for students of Portuguese at Wadham, Trinity, Queen’s, Christ Church and Magdalen. Before coming to Oxford for her DPhil, she completed a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages (Portuguese and Spanish) at the University of Cambridge, and a MA in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She grew up in Huddersfield, in West Yorkshire.

Catriona is involved in various access, outreach and public engagement projects. Between 2024-2025, she was Programme Coordinator at the Queen’s Translation Exchange (QTE), a research and languages advocacy centre based at the Queen’s College, Oxford. She was responsible for QTE’s youth and public engagement programmes, including the Creative Translation Ambassadors scheme and the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators, an annual translation competition for secondary school students in the UK. In 2025, over 22,000 students took part in the Anthea Bell Prize competition. Previously, she was Coordinator for Polly Barton's 2022-23 Translation Residency/TORCH HCP Visiting Fellowship, entitled "The Visible Translator". She also teaches at the Wadham Modern Languages Summer School - a highlight of the year - and has delivered teaching for the Oxford UNIQ Summer School and Pembroke Access Week.

Catriona’s research focusses primarily on cinema and visual culture from across the Portuguese-speaking world, in particular Portuguese-speaking Africa. Her DPhil thesis (supported by the AHRC OOC-DTP, the Clarendon Fund and a Lincoln Kingsgate Scholarship) looked at projects of adaptation in post-independence Angolan cinema, exploring the different ways in which Angolan directors have engaged with literature from both Lusophone and other global contexts. She is particularly interested in processes of translation and adaptation, in all their forms.

Catriona gives lectures and tutorials on modern and contemporary literature from Portugal and Portuguese-speaking Africa for Prelims Papers III and IV (including Lídia Jorge and Ana Luísa Amaral), and FHS Papers VIII and XI (including Eça de Queirós, Florbela Espanca, Noémia de Sousa, Pepetela and Mia Couto). She has also lectured and given tutorials on Brazilian cinema for Paper XII. She also teaches Portuguese into English translation at all levels.

“‘What Else Do You Expect in a City With No Trees?’: Climate Justice, Crisis and Resistance in Ar Condicionado (2020)”, in Sustainability and Innovation, special issue of Question Journal, vol. 7, 2022, pp. 42–50